Tragic death in mind of France rock mystery
A competition to decipher a 230-year-old message on a rock on the coast of Brittany has discovered that a tragic death was at the heart of the inscription.
The village of Plougastel launched a competition to decipher the mysterious message after local experts were unable to create sense of it.
Two winners split the €2,000 (£1,679) prize money on Monday.
Mayor Dominique Cap said their translations had differed but the resulting stories were "virtually identical".
Both winners agreed that the inscription was manufactured in remembrance of a guy who died.
Noël René Toudic, an English teacher and Celtic language expert, said he done the foundation that the writer was a semi-literate man speaking 18th-Century Breton.
The main element part of his translation reads: "Serge died when with no skill at rowing, his boat was tipped over by the wind."
The other winning entry was by historian Roger Faligot and artist Alain Robet.
They also say the written text is written in Breton, but believe a number of the words are Welsh.
Their translation reads: "He was the incarnation of courage and joie de vivre. Somewhere on the island he was struck and he's dead."
Discovered a couple of years ago, the 20-line inscription is written on a metre-high slab in a cove in Brittany, only accessible at low tide.
Alongside normal French letters, some are reversed or upside-down and there are also some Scandinavian-style Ø letters.
The years 1786 and 1787 are visible, dating the inscription to a few years prior to the French Revolution. Addititionally there is the image of a ship and a heart surmounted by a cross.
The inscription was learned a couple of years ago but local academics were unable to interpret it.
Local officials said 61 complete translations were submitted in your competition. Most originated from France, but entries were also submitted from countries like the US and Thailand.
A panel made up of historians judged the entries, discovering that both winning theories were the most plausible interpretations.
Mr Cap said there is still quite a distance to visit "completely fix the mystery" but described the consequence of the competition as a "big step of progress", according to AFP news agency.
